


Reveille

by thedevilchicken



Category: Blade (Movie Series)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 18:16:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7184888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they met Drake again, something had changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reveille

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tarlan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarlan/gifts).



When they met Drake again, something had changed. He was easy to capture. In the start, they didn't get why. 

They'd moved by then 'cause it'd been a year and close to two, bought a warehouse outside of LA though fuck knew where the money came from, fuck knew where the money ever came from or who the fuck the other hunters in their weird-ass organization even were. For all they knew they'd been working for some fucked-up vamp with delusions of grandeur the whole time, Daystar engineered to clear the way for a wholesale takeover. Hannibal tried not to think about it. Mostly he succeeded. After all, they had Dracula locked up in the basement. 

Abby questioned him and she didn't pull her punches. Hannibal watched, thinking maybe he'd find some satisfaction in it for all the teammates they'd lost, for Zoe's mom, Dex, Hedges, everyone before that because hell, they hadn't been the first. Zoe was a good kid and deserved better than a shitty homeschool education from a set of misfit vampire hunters who had no damn vampires left to kill. Abby taught her to shoot. Their new tech geek taught her math. Caulder taught her languages and how to drive stick, just in case. Hannibal taught her PlayStation and Star Trek and what he remembered from high school chem class. When she started quoting Picard, he knew they had a budding geek on their hands; he was so proud.

"He's bleeding," Hannibal said, as Abby walked away from Drake. 

Abby peeled off her gloves. "And?" she said.

"And he hasn't changed." 

Abby put her hands on her hips. " _And_?" she said.

"Don't you think that's weird?"

"As opposed to what?"

She had a point, but Hannibal went ahead and tested his theory anyway. They tested the blood from Abby's gloves, all petri dishes and centrifuges and slides and microscopes like science class for Zoe while they all hovered in wait. And in the end, there it was in black and white, or flashing on the screen of their lab PC at least. 

"You're sure?" Abby said. 

"Does it look like I'm joking?" 

"But you're _sure_?" she said.

"Yeah, I'm sure." 

"Jesus."

There was no trace of the virus there in Drake's blood; apparently, Daystar had killed it. Drake was mortal. Drake was _human_.

They had no idea what to do with him. They kept him locked in that room overnight, tied to the chair, trying to decide what to do with him. Not one of them had a single clue - hell, it wasn't like they could just let him go. 

"What would Blade do?" Caulder asked. 

"He'd kill him," Abby said. 

Hannibal frowned at the two of them. "Don't tell me we're seriously considering that."

"He killed our team, King. Zoe's growing up without a mom because of him."

He couldn't deny it and hell, she was right: Blade would've killed him. He'd've put a bullet in his head the second they'd seen him and half of Hannibal wished they'd done just that and not found out the shit they knew. But they hadn't, and cold-blooded murder seemed extreme even for them. 

They slept on it. And in the morning, Hannibal made eggs and when they were all done eating he took a paper plate of what was left on the stove downstairs to the basement. He untied one of Drake's hands and put the plate on his lap. He sat back and watched the guy eat scrambled eggs with a plastic baby spoon, the bluntest, flimsiest implement they'd had in the kitchen, scowling at the salt of it on his split lip. 

"Why'd you come to LA?" Hannibal asked him, after, once he'd taken back the spoon, just in case. Death by seemingly innocuous utensil was the last way he wanted to go.

"I followed you," Drake said. His voice was hoarse. There was a bruise around his throat where a rope had been, so that made sense. 

"Why?"

"I assumed you'd kill me. It would have been a mercy." 

"Hey, you might still get your wish. Abby's still thinking that over." 

Drake nodded. He closed his eyes and he let Hannibal retie him. He didn't even struggle, not one bit.

It turned out Hannibal was right, fuck fuck fuck, fucking _fuck_ : Daystar had been a shitty power play all along. Blade brought the news in his usual grouchy-ass style and they all cursed under their breath like Zoe hadn't heard ten times worse on TV in like five different languages. 

"I've got a plan," Blade said. 

"Does it involve us storming a fortified building armed to the teeth and hoping for the best?" Hannibal asked. "Because we almost died doing that last time. I vote for plan B. Maybe we can bake them girl scout cookies full of silver, just like grandma used to make."

They didn't go with the cookie plan, however. They went at them head-on and when they got back in, once the first cell of vamps was all fucked up to high heaven, all covered in blood and smarting head to toe, Abby read Zoe a bedtime story and Blade turned his surly attention straight to Drake. 

"We're not killing him," Hannibal said, no goddamn idea why he cared much either way. 

"You're gonna take responsibility?"

Hannibal shrugged. "Maybe, yeah." 

That _maybe_ stuck. Drake didn't seem grateful for the help. The others were pissed he was helping.

When they moved on to take out the next cell, they took Drake with them. It was the first time in four months Drake had been outside and he squinted at the sun through the windshield as Hannibal drove. He slept like the dead at night when Hannibal cuffed him to the motel bed. He didn't try to escape, not once. 

The second night, when the vampires came, Drake saved Hannibal's life outright. He put two of them down without a second's hesitation. Even magically human, the guy was still fast, just not fast enough to sidestep the knife that was in the last vamp's hand before Hannibal shot her.

Hannibal dressed the wound in Drake's shoulder in the motel bathroom later, blood on white tiles under a bright overhead light, the antiseptic making him wince like baby's first cut. When they went to bed, Hannibal didn't cuff him to it; he cuffed him to himself instead. When he woke in the morning, Drake was watching him. 

"You're staring," Hannibal said. "Do I have something in my teeth?"

"You looked vulnerable," Drake replied. "Like I could've snapped your neck before you woke." 

Hannibal arched one brow. "And yet I'm pretty sure you didn't." 

Drake just shrugged.

Texas was too hot and too dusty and Drake gawked at the landscape out of the SUV's passenger side window. Sometimes Hannibal forgot he'd been asleep for centuries. Sometimes he forgot television seemed like some kind of magic and once he found himself explaining email using carrier pigeons as a metaphor. Not that they had anyone to email. Abby and Blade and Zoe were in the next car in the convoy, with Caulder and the rest somewhere behind, and the really sad thing was those guys were all Hannibal had left in the world. And all Drake had was him.

In the new base, they gave Drake a new room with no cuffs, just a lock on the door. Hannibal changed the dressing on his shoulder every morning for weeks till it was on its way to healed. Drake watched him do it. Every time he was in the room, he could feel Drake's eyes on him. 

He brought him books to read. They had car manuals and a how-to book on Windows 2000, a biography of Cary Grant and three romance novels from the 60s, and he tore through them in an afternoon so the next day they rode into town and Hannibal shelled out sixty bucks for a bunch of technical shit and a stack of second-hand paperbacks. Letting him out and walking streets, even under close surveillance, seemed like a big step.

"Who taught you English?" Hannibal asked on the way back to the car. "For fuck's sake don't tell me you somehow learned it by osmosis from under rocks in Syria."

Drake looked up from leafing through his Polidori as they walked. "How long do you think I slept?" he said. "I learned English from Byron."

The second cell proved a hard fight, maybe harder than expected since they were on alert after their attack on the first. When they got back to their shitty derelict motel of a base camp, abandoned except for occasional kids with cans of spraypaint and nothing better to do, Abby's eye was bruised and Hannibal's nose was bloody. Blade, of course, had barely a scratch on him, just like always. He was always an infuriating SOB.

Drake looked at the blood on Hannibal's face. He ran the tip of his tongue over his flat, human canines. When he laughed, it sounded bitter. 

They moved on to Louisiana, driving east with the AC turned up full till they were both almost shivering with it instead of sweating with the heat. They switched seats in a truck stop parking lot somewhere outside Baton Rouge at night and Hannibal taught Drake to drive; they had to do something to pass the time. TV in motel rooms over cheap-ass fast food had already gotten old.

Space was limited at base camp out in New Orleans, in a tumbledown old house in the vieux carré it turned out one of Abby's dad's old friends had owned for years. Abby shared her room with Zoe, Caulder and the guys rolled out sleeping bags on the floorboards in the den, Blade fucked off into the great unknown alone and finally, because it wasn't like they hadn't shared a room in eight, nine, ten different motels by then, Hannibal and Drake headed off upstairs together. Abby locked them in from the hall outside, just in case, despite protests about bathroom breaks.

Drake had been reading Anne Rice for three days in the passenger seat on their way in from Texas and Hannibal struggled not to call that ironic, considering. He put down _Queen of the Damned_ on the nightstand and he shook his head, looking close to bemused. Then they went to sleep too hot under a shaky, shuddering old ceiling fan, too exhausted from the drive to be distracted by it.

Six days later, they took out the third cell. Hannibal came back with a broken hand and Abby with a dislocated shoulder; Blade had broken his precious sunglasses somewhere along the way and brooded like it was some kind of fucking tragedy. Drake strapped up Hannibal's hand as they sat there on the bed in the weird old attic room they were sharing, his hands hot in the humid summer air despite the fan above their heads. 

"You're going to get yourself killed," Drake said, handing him two aspirin and a glass of water. They'd discussed modern medicine in the car one afternoon. Drake learned quickly.

"Them first," Hannibal replied. 

"Perhaps." 

There was a moment then when it looked like Drake had something else to say. He drank a mouthful of water from Hannibal's glass instead then went to sleep in the bed they shared. 

They crossed out through Mississippi into Alabama the next day and Alabama into Florida the next, headed toward Miami with Drake behind the wheel thanks to Hannibal's still mostly fucked-up hand. They were ambushed on the road after dark on the third night, somewhere not too far from Tampa, made the local news like some shitty drug deal gone hugely south though that hadn't been the plan in any way. Hannibal only hesitated a second before he handed Drake a gun packed full of UV rounds. Drake didn't hesitate at all; he fired, and the vampires burned. Hannibal watched him incredulously with a shiver of adrenaline, with a sick thump-thump of his too-quick pulse. Drake had saved his life.

And after, even though it fucking sickened him right through, even though he knew his dead friends would be spinning in their graves, they found a cheap motel and once they'd locked the door and shoved a chair up underneath the handle, they stripped each other right down to the skin and fucked for all they were worth. It was hot and it was breathless, Drake's big hands in Hannibal's hair, skin to skin and mouth to mouth all with a sharp metallic edge of desperation. Drake pushed inside him. Hannibal wanted him to. He wished he hadn't.

After, he chalked it up to the adrenaline, the relief of survival. After, he took a shower and he tried to pretend it hadn't happened at all. When he went back into the room, Drake looked up from _'Salem's Lot_. All Hannibal could do was laugh. The whole thing was fucked up. The whole thing was absurd.

Miami was hot and bright and sandy and Hannibal wore shorts lounging by the motel pool in the afternoon while Drake started on Anita Blake and snickered from behind his book. Then, once Abby had gotten through to her local contact, they left the motel and moved out to a disused community center in an oddly gun-toting suburb. Hannibal turned on a whole battery of fans so training in the hall didn't feel like boxing practice in a sauna or MMA inside a greenhouse in a heatwave, though he guessed people throwing people judo-style inside glass houses wouldn't've been a whole lot better than them throwing stones. Drake joined him. He might not've been a vampire, but the son of a bitch still hit hard. Abby watched. Hannibal wasn't sure if she looked impressed by Drake or just disturbed.

"I don't trust him," she said one night at dinner, some weird fish thing Caulder cooked. They took it in turns and Caulder's nights weren't exactly anxiously anticipated. "You know what he did."

"You trust me," Hannibal said, and he glanced Drake's way. "You know the kind of shit I did for Danica." Abby couldn't deny what they both knew was true.

They were there three weeks in the end, looking for a way in, Blade wandering around in that damn full length black leather coat of his like he didn't even feel the heat and Abby endlessly, restlessly cleaning her guns at the kitchen table, getting gun oil on the tablecloth that stained like a bitch. Hannibal taught Drake to make pancakes and they fucked each other up on martial arts mats in the hall each and every afternoon. Zoe actually talked Blade into reading her a story two nights in a row. Abby sure as hell looked impressed by that, _and_ disturbed. 

They took Drake with them to the fourth cell, just to wait in the car outside and keep the engine running. He made a hell of a getaway driver for a guy his age; they got away by the skin of their teeth, Drake dragging Hannibal in through the passenger side window, and they lost them thanks to Drake's creepy eidetic memory and an afternoon he'd spent with a roadmap of downtown Miami. The familiars were pissed but the vampires were dead and that was what counted, and when they went back to the weird-ass little hall, glancing at sidelong at each other all the way, it was dumb, really dumb, but once the others were inside and the doors were locked, Hannibal dragged Drake into the office and pushed him up against the wall.

"You keep saving my ass," Hannibal said, tight against him in the dark. 

"You saved mine," Drake replied. He guessed he had.

When they kissed, Hannibal didn't try to make believe it hadn't happened. 

Atlanta came next, then Nashville, a right turn to head east to Norfolk and military vampires on military bases turned out to be fucking terrifying. Caulder got his arm broken in Philly and Drake filled in for him. In the morning, Hannibal caught him with Zoe; she smiled a sad little smile as he spoke to her lowly, nodded her head and then walked away. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what the fuck he'd said; she'd known all along what he'd done so they'd kept them apart when they could, but the day after that he started teaching her history. She was reading about Egypt, she said; Drake had been there, and had stories to tell.

"How many more?" Hannibal asked Abby one night, in a shitty backwoods diner by their roadside motel on the way up to Canada. 

"Maybe thirty in North and South America," she said. "Then there's the rest of the world after that." 

It had already taken them six months to get to eight so he smiled a wry smile and didn't say how long the rest might take. She went back to prodding at her mediocre chilli. He went back to Drake. 

In the room that night, they did it on their knees, Hannibal's chest pressed up tight to Drake's back, his hands at the glyph on Drake's chest, his thrusts hard and deep enough to rock the bed into the wall like some dumbass amateur pornography. Drake's hair was growing in, thick and dark like Hannibal's was, and he twined his fingers in it. Drake shaved every morning while Hannibal watched and every now and then he'd cut himself, a thin trickle of blood would run down his neck and as their eyes met, they knew: they both remembered the thirst. They'd never forget.

"Do you miss it?" Hannibal asked, once, while Drake was blotting the blood from his chin. 

"The blood?"

"All of it."

Drake looked at him, met Hannibal's gaze in the mirror. "Sometimes," he said. "You don't?"

He wanted to say no. He wrapped his arms around Drake's waist instead and leaned against his back and sighed. "Sometimes I even miss Danica," he said, his mouth against Drake's shoulder. "Then I remember she was a fucking harpy who tried to feed me to her goddamn vampire pomeranian and then somehow all's right with the world again." He ran his fingers over the glyph on Drake's chest. "Is it weird, killing vampires?"

Drake turned. He walked Hannibal back up against the nearest available wall and the cold tile against his bare back made him shiver, or at least he thought it was the tile. 

"Did I ever tell you why I slept?" he asked. 

"I'm gonna go ahead and guess you were tired."

"I was. Tired of disappointment." He smiled, almost sadly but toothily, broadly enough that if there'd still been points to his canines, Hannibal would've seen them up close and personal. "Nothing's changed. There's not a shred of honor among them. You have more."

"So you're gonna kill them all for shitting on your expectations?"

Drake's mouth found the crook of Hannibal's neck. His teeth grazed over his pulse and made it quicken. 

"Every one of them," he said, and Hannibal believed him. He believed they could do it. He believed they _would_.

They went back to bed not long after that and the sex was face to face and hot and slow and somehow resolute. Drake moved inside him, a sheen of sweat standing out on his brow, Hannibal's hands gripping tight at his arms, his shoulders, his back. He liked to think he'd done the right thing by saving him. In his fucking sentimental moments, he liked to think Drake had woken up for this. He liked to think that this, at least, wasn't such a bitter disappointment as his traitorous, backstabbing, conniving, jackass progeny. And that was just Danica, never mind the rest.

They left again the next morning, Hannibal behind the wheel heading north toward Toronto while Drake sat in the passenger side skimming a copy of Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ with a look that switched frequently between amusement and disgust. Hannibal found it fucking hilarious. He'd made him watch _Nosferatu_ three nights before and watching Drake's face with the book was even better than watching the movie.

There were miles to go then, to Toronto, to the end. There were hundreds left, maybe thousands, thousands of miles and thousands of vampires, the ones that Daystar had left behind to inherit the earth. They'd kill them all or die trying, side by side. It was what they woke each day for. It was what they'd wake each day for till every one of them was gone.

But, in the meantime, Hannibal couldn't wait to see what Drake would make of _Twilight_.


End file.
